Ask a music scene micro celebrity

[electrical]

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As a Chicagoan and a gambler, please lay odds on the following happening:

-Chicago is named host of the 2016 Olympics
-Chicago gets a casino within the next 10 years
-The Cubs win the World Series within the next 10 years

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I am not a gambler, honestly. I play poker, and I will play games for stakes (I am a fish at Nine-ball, a shortstop in one-pocket, decent at three-cushion), but I don't like betting on things where my only edge comes from other people or objects performing as I hope they will.

That said, I used to offer Novotny a standing 5:1 on the Cubs making the post season and I made pretty good money over the years.

The rest, meh. I don't know.

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Did you read Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life? If so, what did you think of it, and of the Big Black chapter in particular?

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Here's what I wrote about it in a thread on the Electrical Audio forums:

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There is a problem with any book like this. It is written by someone who wasn't there. He's trying to convey the importance of a culture that was really a series of individual events, each one of them unique and life-changing for anybody actually there at the time, but impossible to convey to someone who wasn't.

He's also telling the life story of a peer group that includes me, a bunch of my friends, and our counterparts around the world. It is impossible to write a book that includes an important part of my life that will not be read by me with some suspicion. I was there, he wasn't. Inevitably, he will look like an idiot some of the time.

That said, I liked the chapter on the Minutemen.

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(Side question: Were the Butthole Surfers hands-down the craziest band of that era, as the book seems to imply? If they weren't, who was?)

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If you weren't there to see it, you might not believe it, but there were a lot of really effed-up bands in the 1980s, and the Buttholes weren't even particularly weird in context. Mudhead, Pile of Cows, Sloppage, the Thrown-Ups and the whole Bay Area scenes surrounding SRL and the Idiot... Now that was some weird right there.

The Butthole Surfers were easily the most selfish, childish little pricks in that scene, but not the weirdest.

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Which Chicago rock critic is a bigger douchebag; Bill Wyman, Jim DeRogatis, Greg Kot, or someone else?

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Well, Jim DeRogatis is clearly the biggest, and Wyman no longer even pretends to cover Chicago, so he's immaterial. Kot generally has his heart in the right place, though he does fall for sucker bait like the Polyphonic Spree and the like. The dumbest professional music writer in Chicago though is a retard named Jessica Hopper, whose writing is simultaneously sophomoric, vapid and excruciatingly self-satisfied. It is literally impossible to glean any actual content or criticism from her writing, which is an achievement of some sort, I suppose.

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What do you think of Pitchfork Magazine?

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I virtually never think of Pitchfork Magazine.